Author: knjohn

How to Stop Micromanaging Your Employees | AllBusiness.com

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One of the most common struggles a new leader faces is learning to delegate and let go of the “little things.” While you may feel like you need constant oversight into your team’s work, micromanaging employees damages morale and drives away your top performers. It also prevents your team from doing truly creative or innovative work.

Part of solving this problem requires establishing healthy communication routines with your team members or leads. The rest comes down to gaining—and keeping—their trust. To help you break any micromanagement tendencies, we asked members of YEC Next this question:

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Business Gift Giving Etiquette and Mistakes to Avoid | Small Business Trends

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For business owners, the holiday season is often a time for purchasing client, employee, and partner gifts for everyone who supports your business throughout the year. However, it’s important to give gifts in a way that won’t offend or create awkward situations among those who are important to your small business.

Before shopping for holiday gifts for clients, colleagues, or employees, consider the following business gift giving etiquette tips for all occasions.

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When Your Consulting Firm Should Give Free Advice | David A. Fields

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Jo Uppalnite, CEO of Cocoa Roasters, calls you in search of advice because she’s mired in a challenge. Jo’s smart to call you because: 1) your consulting firm specializes in Jo’s issue; 2) you’ve spent your consulting career developing skills in this area; and, 3) she’s too amped up on roasted cocoa to make decisions without supervision.

While Jo’s problem perplexes her, your consulting firm has untied her tangle many times at many clients. You could point her in the right direction during your short chat.

Should you?

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Why Should Your Business Invest in Apprenticeships? | business.com

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Some of the world’s most prosperous economies – including Germany, Australia and the UK – have robust apprenticeship systems. School leavers and job changers in those countries can access education and training that leads directly to the workplace, while the companies that sponsor them get top-quality workers with the precise skills they need.

In the United States, however, apprenticeships are far less common. Many businesses see them as complicated and expensive and don’t know if they really work. Others aren’t sure the benefits are worth the cost. U.S. employers are more comfortable shopping for talent than creating it. However, astute employers know it’s critical to have access to a pipeline of workers with 21st-century skills.

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Apps Are Tracking Your Location 24/7 and It’s Totally Legal | Digital Trends

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A shocking new investigation reveals that companies can track you constantly, with your phone constantly broadcasting your exact location at all times.

The New York Times published the investigation on Thursday, using a leaked dataset from one of the many location data companies that collect data from your favorite mobile apps, and the results are unsettling. The investigation, part of the Times Privacy Project series, looked at data of more than 50 billion location “pings” from the phones of more than 12 million Americans from 2016-2017.

“You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book. They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor,” the article reads.

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Instagram to now flag potentially offensive captions, in addition to comments | TechCrunch

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Earlier this year, Instagram launched a feature that would flag potentially offensive comments before they’re posted. Now, the social media platform is expanding this preemptive flagging system to Instagram’s captions, as well. The new feature will warn users after they’ve written a caption for a feed post that Instagram’s AI detects as being similar to those that have already been reported for bullying.

It will not, however, block users from publishing their hateful remarks. Instead, Instagram says these little nudges simply give users time to reconsider their words — something it found was helping to cut down on the bullying taking place in the comments section after the launch of the earlier feature.

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Seven Frugal Cookbook Recommendations for Getting Started on Inexpensive Cooking at Home | The Simple Dollar

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On The Simple Dollar, I’ve often written about my love for cookbooks. My friends and family know about this and often give me cookbooks as gifts for the holidays, which means I’ve actually reached a point where my cookbooks fill up a small bookshelf and I have to be selective about what I keep and what I pass along to others.

I enjoy several kinds of cookbooks for various reasons. I like ones that have a lot of basic recipes I can trust and modify. I like ones that are reference works for ingredients and equipment, like lists of spices that go well together. I also really like ones that focus on technique. And I like ones that are focused on “framework recipes,” where you can kind of fill in the blanks with what you have on hand. The only ones I generally don’t like are ones that are just collections of complicated recipes without any sort of theme or pattern; I can do without them. A cookbook should either answer a question very quickly, show me how to do something or inspire me to try something new that builds upon what I already know — and ideally do more than one of those things.

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Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security | WIRED

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Monday’s split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department’s inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI’s handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump’s campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.

The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there’s conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump’s dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

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